Fiction for the criminally inclined

January 26, 2015

A great many London commuters will recognise the pivotal plot-defining moment of Paula Hawkins' exhilarating debut novel, The Girl on the Train: your train stops at signals at the same particular spot, at the same time every morning, day in and day out, week after week.

After a while you know, for example, the nuance of every last piece of grafitti adorning the wall just outside St Pancras and the pattern of traffic movement north of Luton.

Hawkins' commuter, Rachel Watson, gets a far more interesting view than ever I did. She peers right into the privacy of a couple whose house backs on to her line. She also has more imagination, and from the brief first-coffee glimpses she has of "Jason and Jess", as they become known to her, she constructs a fantasy of their entire lives.

Rachel, of course, sees something she should not. And she is not a reliable witness , carrying as she does on her daily journey more baggage than the average 747, including blossoming alcoholism and a vibrant bitterness for the life with her ex-husband that she left behind in a house that is just a few doors down from "golden couple", Jason and Jess.

It's a beautiful premise for a psychological thriller, and Hawkins sets it up cleverly right from the outset, drawing the reader inexorably into Rachel's confused world of day-dreams, half-truths and alcohol-fuelled mis-steps. Even before "Jess" goes missing, throwing the ill-equipped Rachel into the middle of a domestic mystery, we are locked into her battles with herself and those around her.

She is a complex protagonist, to say the very least. With her huge appetite for sauvignon blanc and self-destruction she does not cut a sympathetic character and yet throughout the novel I was pulling for her in spite of myself.

Despite a clever, almost irresistible plot, The Girl on the Train is elevated by Hawkins' gift for characterisation, and in particular the three women whose inter-twined tales reveal the story. Each is convincingly drawn with a warts-and-all honesty that helps keep the reader off balance.

It's probably inevitable, given the missing wife theme, that The Girl on the Train has been compared to Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl. The comparison is most apt in the meticulous execution of the narrative. Hawkins keeps the reader guessing from first to last while flinging them headlong through the whirlwind of Rachel's scattered and haphazard reality. This is no me-too novel, however, but carries instead the distinctive imprint of a writer with an elegant grasp of human frailty and a tremendous gift for story-telling.

An online teaser campaign run throughout the last months of 2014 made The Girl on the Train one of the most hotly anticipated titles of the year. It lived up to that promise and then some. I demolished it in a little over 24 hours and resented the time I spent away from it. Hawkins' follow-up, whenever it arrives, will be more eagerly awaited still.

December 29, 2014

One of the features of CJ Sansom's hugely enjoyable Shardlake series, is that towards the end of each Tudor adventure, the hunchbacked lawyer-cum-detective swears off involvement in affairs of state forever.

As Shardlake and his peers often observe, however, the great men of politics are not easily denied and so it proves every time some Cromwell, Cranmer or other knocks on the door of his Chancery Lane home demanding one last service.

In Lamentation, the sixth book in the series, it is Cranmer - on behalf of Queen Number Six, Catherine Parr who calls again - who sends for Shardlake, just has he did some years previously in the events described in Sovereign, which covered an earlier period of events when an earlier Queen (#5) was still on the throne, her young head still attached to its body.

With another Queen in similar danger, and one for whom Shardlake has the softest of spots, against his better judgement, the lawyer heads to Whitehall for his instructions. There he finds a court in the grip of yet another religious convulsion as traditionalists and reformers jostle for pre-eminence in the dying light of the rapidly fading star of King Henry VIII. Queen Catherine has lost a book she has written Lamentation of a Sinner, a volume that in the wrong hands could place her in jeopardy of charges of treason and or heresy.

At 650 pages, Lamentation is an epic, and I know some readers find the Shardlake series a little slow and occasionally laboured with too much detail.

For me, however, it is the detail that makes these books special. Sansom lavishes care on his characters who are always convincing and memorable, whether they are the wherry men on the Thames or the highest officials in the lands. And from the ever-shifting and dangerous sands of King Henry's court to the sights, sounds and smells of Tudor England these novels are absolute treasure chests of rich historical detail and intrigue. Sansom has a gift for story-telling and a feeling for history that has ensured that his books have consistently brought this fascinating period to life. And he has done so in the most compelling fashion through tightly woven stories of murder and treachery that touch many of the best known and infamous characters of the period.

Lamentation is no exception. Long it may be, but it never flags as it delivers on its promise of illustrating the febrile nature of politics and religion that Henry has sown through his combination of personal weakness, ruthlessness and changeability.

These books have become highlights of each of the six years Sansom has delivered them since Dissolution a decade ago. And even though the Henrician era is over by the time Lamentation closes - no spoiler there - I hope the series outlasts the King.

August 06, 2014

Can anyone out there be surprised that when Stephen King turns his considerable talents to detective fiction he can be every bit as kick-ass as he is in any other genre?

Mr Mercedes is an absolute beauty of a novel, full of all of those characteristics that have made King a global publishing phenomenon. It's a wonderfully realised story full of convincing and enjoyable characters and all the terrific writing his loyal readership have come to expect.

In audio version, a medium I generally use only in the car or when running, it prompted me on more than one occasion to take the long way home from the office or to run a kilometre further, just to be able to listen to a little more. A brilliant performance from veteran actor and narrator Will Patton, who in particular captured the tone of Retired Detective Bill Hodges to perfection, enhanced the experience but the real star here was King's peerless story-telling ability.

Right from the off, this book delivers. In the opening scene we are introduced to job-seekers queueing in the damp pre-dawn mist for a shot at a minimum-wage job in the recession-struck Midwest. With all of his customary ruthlessness King brings these poor souls into our lives only to wipe them out just a few minutes later as a large Mercedes saloon car with an unknown driver at the wheel kills eight and injures a dozen or so more. Even in these few pages he creates a sense of time and place that anchors the book.

This is no Christine, however, as this car has a driver, revealed early on as technology store employee Brady Hartsfield, who a year on from his crime begins to taunt the retired detective who could not track him down. But rather than provoke the lonely, bored Bill Hodges to suicide, as Hartsfield hopes, he offers him a new lease of life as the detective resumes the hunt.

Mr Mercedes is told from the viewpoints of these adversaries, gradually revealing their stories as Hodges closes in on his quarry. It's a hugely satisfying chase. Hodges is joined in his quest by two unlikely sidekicks: the highly intelligent kid who cuts his lawn and the socially inept cousin of another woman with an interest in finding the Mercedes killer. In parallel, we are given a striking portrait of a killer who has become uncoupled from reality and feels compelled to engage Hodges as a direct opponent.

It is delivered with the idiomatic flourish that marks out all of King's work - and which I love - as well as the master storyteller's art of giving the reader just enough bait for the hook to be taken, while holding back enough secrets to be able to ratchet up the tension.

I loved this book, which joins Duma Key and The Stand as my favourites from King and I'm thrilled to see from a letter from him stating that this is the beginning of a trilogy "concerning Bill Hodges, his friends... and his enemies". I've always encouraged those who have resisted reading King because of the "horror thing" to give him a go. He's a brilliant writer with tremendous range and this is another considerable feather in his cap.

July 30, 2014

The Nightmare Place is the most conventional of Steve Mosby's dark crime novels and - these two facts are not connected - also my favourite of the eight he's published.

Mosby is a writer of intense and demanding tales that often come with an off-beam edge to them that makes them particularly unsettling reads. The Nightmare Place, a haunting police procedural driven by DI Zoe Dolan - Mosby's most memorable character yet - lacks nothing for tension, drama and darkness but does not have (and nor does it need) that odd edge.

From the first paragraph, however, Mosby heads for that place he writes so brilliantly, that place on the boundaries of your consciousness where you feel the least comfortable. His books almost feel like a fictionalisation of your worst fears - the noise downstairs during the night, the monster under the bed... Mosby also imbues his books with a very strong sense of place, again with a gift of ensuring that those places feel all too real without ever becoming anything like welcoming. The overall impact is claustrophobic and disturbing. Somehow when a crime is committed in a Mosby novel, I always feel like I'm watching, smelling and hearing it rather than merely reading it.

The Nightmare Place follows DI Dolan's pursuit of "The Creeper", a man who stalks and attacks women in their own home. Told broadly from the perspective of women - and women the reader knows or suspects to be at risk - the novel presents a gripping and chilling exmination of the psychology of fear. It works from the very extremes of how people react to an immediate threat, through to what for many is the day to day tension of living their lives in a world they find alien and bewildering. Dolan herself, to all outwards appearances the very toughest of nuts, is plagued by her own memories and fears of childhood.

As she closes in on the attacker - or vice versa - the tension for both characters and readers rises palpably and Mosby delivers a great edge-of-the-seat experience which holds its secrets tight until the last.

To my mind he is currently operating in the very top tier of British crime writers, and this novel is confirmation of his great skill and versatility. It's an absiolute ripper and deserves a broad audience.

June 19, 2014

You know you're in a Mo Hayder novel when just seconds after the start of the audio the hairs on the back of the neck stand up and the shiver runs deliciously down the spine.

I'm not sure there's anyone doing creepy quite as well as Hayder is doing it right now. This is a writer with a first class degree in the manipulation of the reader's emotions and in particular apprehension and fear. At times during Wolf, I felt I was in the room, in the woods, in danger - waiting , breath held for the axe to fall...

Audio is a particularly good medium for scary. There are fewer escape routes available to the listener than there are to a reader and a strong performance can enhance the drama and compound the tension.

Hayder had a considerable ally in this enterpire in narrator Jot Davies, who eloquently and skilfully paces the story and brings the fear to the surface in the way that music so often does in film. In a story told from multiple viewpoints, Davies also brings character to the main protagonists.

Wolf is the seventh title in the consistently excellent and disarming Jack Caffrey series. The over-arching narrative arc is now well established, with Caffrey driven onwards by his obsession with discovering the fate of his brother, who was snatched as a child by paedophiles. This storyline plays a major role here as The Walking Man, a vagrant driven by similar demons and a confidant/antagonist of Caffrey's, promises the detective some vital information about his brother if he investigates the strange appearance of a dog with a tag around its neck reading "Help Us".

The note originated from a remote and secluded house where a family is embroiled in a terrifying ordeal at the hands of two unknown men, holding them for unknown purposes. Caffrey, with very little to go on, is in a race against time to find and rescue them.

Wolf , in part, is an exploration of fear, as Hayder takes the reader under the skin of the various actors in the play: the father of the family held hostage worried for his wife and daughter; the man who is holding them, outwardly calm and in control, but inside all uncertainty and doubt; and finally Caffrey, who fears he will never discover what happened to his brother Ewen.

Wolf is smart, well-paced and always unnerving. Don't read it in the dark...

June 09, 2014

It is said that Hollywood actresses of a certain age struggle to find great roles as the image-obsessed industry drinks only at the fountain of feminine youth. Those waiting for the casting director's call should therefore immediately start lobbying for Tinseltown to buy up the rights to Laura Lippman's terrific novel After I'm Gone.

This Baltimore family saga, with its piquant murder mystery, is positively bursting with finely written female characters covering an age spectrum that would comfortably embrace generations from Jennifer Lawrence (born in 1990) through to Susan Sarandon (1946).

The triumph of an excellent audio version, downloaded from Audible, is that narrator Linda Emond is able to bring to life the six women at its heard (and a handful of feckless men) with individuality and character.

The source material is fabulous. This is Lippman at her formidable best, delivering a rich lustrous tale that burrows deep into the anatomy and psychology of a family torn apart when Felix Brewer, the father of three daughters (Linda, Rachel and Michelle) flees justice in 1976 - never to be seen again. Brewer leaves his wife, Bambi, to pick up the pieces without the financial support she has become used to. It's the tale also of his mistress Julie, who feels just as abandoned until she subsequently disappears herself exactly 10 years later. The final female lead is the wife of the fugitive's best friend.

To a lesser extent it is also the story of retired Detective Sanchez, aBaltimore police consultant who picks up the murder of Julie (whos remains are found some years on) as a cold case. Sanchez is both the book's narrator, unravelling the secrets of the disappearance of Julie and pursuing justice for her.

But the murder story - as good as it is, and it will keep you guessing right to the end - never assumes the heart of the book, which is occupied by Bambi's struggle to keep up appearances in the absence of both her husband and her income and the struggle of her daughters and Julie to rebuild their lives in the absence of Felix. The most powerful and fascinating scenes are those played out between the daughters, and it is in these that the audio narrator Emond truly shows her craft and demonstrates that that craft is performance art. I rather suspect that reading the novel would have been a lesser experience.

As ever, Lippman also delivers an honest if affectionate portrait of her home City of Baltimore, this time in the upper, middle class Jewish community. It gives the story the strongest of roots from which to thrive

April 14, 2014

Among my most prized possessions on the hardback crime shelf is a 1999 signed first edition of John Connolly's first Charlie Parker novel, Every Dead Thing. Originally, I was attracted to the book by its vivid, anatomical cover design which I spotted in the late, lamented Murder One bookshop on London's Charing Cross Road.

I was stunned to see the 1999 publication date when I opened that book earlier this week, because I somehow still think of Connolly as a "new" writer, which is clearly absurd given I've now read all 12 Parker novels as well as other works. After a lot of thought I've come to the conclusion that the reason for this trick of the mind is that even after a dozen outings, the Parker series feels incredibly fresh, with each new book taking an unexpected and thrilling turn.

The reason for this Connolly retrospective is that the twelfth novel, The Wolf in Winter is the best in the series so far - a huge achievement given how much great work has gone before, and how much of Parker's story has already been told.

The perfect Parker novel, and perhaps this is it, combines a number of essential ingredients: a personal cause for the Maine-based detective; a supernatural plot that feels close enough to normality to keep you from wanting to turn out the lights; a cast of macabre and ruthless characters - including the good guys; and a narrative bursting with tension and emotion. The best Connolly tales open themselves up like an unwelcome noise downstairs in the dead of night: you know there's nothing down there, but you're scared of it all the same. You don't want to check it out, but you know you have no choice.

The Wolf in Winter has it all in spades. Parker's investigation into the suspicious death of a former source, a homeless man, leads him to the strange, strange Maine town of Prosperous, a city seemingly as lucky as its name, untouched by economic or human trauma at a time when both are in abundance.

At the rotten, corrupt heart of Prospersous is the church of a long lost sect that was transported brick-by-brick from northern England and rebuilt in Maine and a secret the inhabitants of the town, and in particular its elected elders, will stop at nothing to protect.

But stop at nothing is Parker's stock in trade and he arrives in Prosperous intent on discovering the truth behind his source's apparent suicide. Naturally when obstacles are placed in his way, Parker prepares to unleash his own particular version of hell on people who already have more than a passing acquaintance with the concept.

This is, put simply, a brilliant and sophisticated thriller written by one of the undisputed masters of the genre operating at the top of his considerable game. Five stars and then some.

The first hundred or so pages of Apple Tree Yard are among the most arresting I can ever remember reading. Louise Doughty's description of how 50-something Yvonne Carmichael - respected geneticist, happily married wife and mother - fell into a dangerous and addictive sexual relationship with a man she'd not previously met was breathless, compelling, and dare I say it, disturbingly exciting.

As the tale starts with Carmichael in the dock at the Old Bailey, it's clear from the outset that the relationship has led her somehow to catastrophe, and so it's not just sexual tension fuelling the story. That story is narrated by Carmichael on a twin track - with the history of the relationship intertwined with the hearing that seeks to unravel the truth.

It's a clever and disconcerting novel that emerges, focused on the human mind's ability to deceive both itself and others - the tales we tell ourselves are often more fascinating than those we tell others.

Given that Doughty reveals the location for the denouement of her plot so early, the success of the novel rests in no small measure on her ability to maintain sufficient mystery and intrigue while moving the story on. This she does, leading an impatient reader through the present and the past with both pace and control. Only during the latter stage of the book, when the trial comes into sharper focus, does Doughty stumble slightly; I found some of the twists in the trial a little implausible and the narrative less riveting than earlier phases.

That said, the exploration of the pscyhology Yvonne Carmichael is brilliantly executed throughout and stands as a stark warning to those who think they know everything there is to know about their partner, or indeed about themselves!

This is a cracking dark thriller, one of those books that will keep you tied into it long after you've turned the final page. For me, Doughty's back catalogue has just gone to somewhere near the top of this summer's holiday reading list.

April 02, 2014

Since 1989, when John Grisham published his debut novel, A Time To Kill, this lawyer-turned-writer has been consistently brilliant. Aside from his YA Theodore Boone novels, I've read everything he's published. And whether the book was about tragic baseball careers (Calico Joe), washed-up football stars landing in Italy (Playing for Pizza) or even a middle-aged couple's ill-fated attempt to skip Christmas, the books have been sublimely readbale and I've enjoyed all of them.

Grisham is best known for his legal thrillers, of course, a series launched by A Time To Kill, which despite some of the brilliant novels that have followed, remains perhaps the very best, a mesmerising tale of prejudice, violence and bravery in Ford County, Mississippi, the deepest well of the deep south.

So when Sycamore Row arrived, promising a return to Ford County and a reacquaintance with litigator Jake Brigance, the fighting-for-the-underdog template for so many a Grisham hero since, I was genuinely excited.

And there's a reason why I've lavished so much praise on Grisham above - and that's because I don't want anybody to think that what follows is somehow intellectual or literary snobbery about a popular writer. It isn't. I love Grisham's books and I will continue to look forward to them.

But Sycamore Row, I'm afraid, is a bit of a stinker. Reading it was a strange experience. Usually I race through Grisham, but this was a slow process and it took me a while to figure out why: I was bored.

At 440 pages it's about 180 pages too long, and in the middle it drifts drearily, following a series of sub-plots and legal arguments that add very little to the story. At the same time the likely conclusion of the story is signalled too early, and sufficiently clearly that most readers will probably spot it. I rarely give up on a book before I've finished it, but came close with this one, pressing on because I trust Grisham to deliver.

The plot itself provides all the ingredients for a classic Grisham thriller. An elderly man, suffering from terminal cancer, takes his own life, leaving behind a handwritten will that bestows his great fortune on his black housekeeper, while cutting his family out entirely. A letter accompanying the will appoints Jake Brigance counsel and tasks him with defending it to the hilt. The cast too was arranged perfectly, a colourful circus of small town folk from patrician judges to court house bruisers, rednecks from central casting and a coffee shop chorus commenting on every step of the trial.

Sitting at the explosive inter-section of money and race, I expected the plot to take off, but it never quite did. While the prose had Grisham's usual languid articulacy, there was too little pace to the story, and during some moments I wondered if it hadn't been written with a television serial in mind as it often felt like a succession of vignettes each with their own beginning and end rather than a single coherent work.

And so ultimately, Sycamore Row was a disappointment, perhaps particularly so because the return of Jake Brigance in such promising circumstances held so much potential.

March 07, 2014

The Goldfinch is a long, sprawling book that requires a signficant investment of the reader. The narrative traces the journey of one Theo Decker, whose mother is killed in the bombing of an art gallery - an event that he escapes with both his life and a famous artwork, the Goldfinch. At times the story crawls along at a pace that would cripple the work of less gifted writers. Tartt, however, lavishes on her reader sentences, passages and pages of such beauty, and that are laced with such searing human and emotional insight that even while drifting the story is compelling.